of elves and men

Several recent conversations fused together, provoking thought and prose on forests and plains.

Forest is fantasy: red-topped mushrooms crouching under fir and fern, footpaths leading away up piney slopes and thick beds of moss coating stone and fallen branch. Her scents are powerful. Subtle, too. Smells of green and clean. Smells still and wet. Forest is mystery. Secrecy. Creatures and things hidden behind trunk and beneath knoll. Faraway rustlings and mutterings, snappings and scrapings. Wood nymphs, trolls and dwarves. Dim, black: under fir and towering pine, even the hilltops sheltered, surrounded. Secure, ensconced. Forest is she: her deep, dark moods pulling you to some unforeseeable destination. She is wild imagination and a hundred years of quiet, predictable growth.

Grassland is eternal heavens and unending horizon, straight and unbroken, the way bearing neither too far left nor too far right. Prairie is always he: solid, stark, open, strong-tempered and generous. He has no subtleties. He gives up everything in a wide, sweeping panorama: all his blue, blue sky, his rich, black earth, his bent and stubbled trees, his grasses, the hunting hawk and prowling fox and creeping critters. It's heart-land: honest in unpredictability, in harshness. The killing snowstorm, the drowning thundershower, the long dry spells. The ferocious wind that tears down from the north and lances the skin. He loves tough: reddens the neck of the soil-toiler. He heartens the appetite and puts you to work. And never deprives of a sunrise and a sunset, an ocean of land edged in light.

To say one is more beautiful -- he or she -- is folly. Just plain silliness. It's the taste of salt or sugar. The feel of wood or of air. Both good and created.